Call for papers

We are citizens of the European Union. However, we feel that Europe is becoming less and less united. The Founders of the European Community promised a free and united Europe, a United States of Europe. And our Europe is now more and more divided, subservient, unprepared for risks; its member states are less and less willing to share. We no longer recognise our Europe.

Our states never got a mandate to govern Europe. Brussels institutions had been established to manage integration: from the starting point of exclusive national sovereignty to the end point of a federation with limited but real powers, common to all Europeans as citizens of the European Union and as citizens of federated states. Heads of government, elected to govern nation states, have too long usurped the role of a European government in the European Council.

Unable to solve crises for lack of pooling their sovereignty, they keep going from failure to failure. Unwilling to acknowledge their errors, less so to relinquish their factitious privileges, they are governing in a hurry, without a plan for Europe, pretending there is no alternative to the abdication of their sovereignty to global finance or carbon giants, and multiplying the number of victims of their improvised and disorderly actions.

Governed by the blind, Europe scares us. Governments exploit our fear of the unknown to maintain their powers. Extreme movements capitalize on it to conquer power, while mainstream governments fear losing it. This diabolical spiral of fear must be brought to an end. It is up to us, citizens of the European Union and peoples of this continent, to offer a policy of hope to our own nation states. Let us reconnect with the European dream of which governments have deprived us.

This website displays A CONTINENTAL MANIFESTO for all our European fellow citizens. Read it. Take time to react. All those who are willing and have time to write a short paper to broaden the debate, provide constructive criticism of the Manifesto and develop proposals will have the opportunity to publish their papers on this website and, when appropriate, in a small book (or a bigger one). Conversations on this website will necessarily explore new paths. Nobody will build Europe for us, citizens. But we have got the power to invent it, and give it a constitution.